So the real world is a beautiful mess. Is this kind of undirected mechanism—just what we would expect in a universe governed by unthinking underlying laws and with a strong arrow of time—sufficient to account for all the spectacular intricacy of our planet’s biosphere? “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin writes in On the Origin of Species. But is his simple mechanism really enough to make dolphins and butterflies and rain forests from a meager collection of organic molecules fighting for free energy? Can the wonders of efficiency and ingenuity we see in biological organisms really
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